Biopolitical Itineraries

BIOPOLITICAL ITINERARIES: MEXICO IN CONTEMPORARY TOURIST LITERATURE A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Guelph by RYAN RASHOTTE In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy November, 2011 © Ryan Rashotte, 2011 ABSTRACT BIOPOLITICAL ITINERARIES: MEXICO IN CONTEMPORARY TOURIST LITERATURE Ryan Rashotte Advisor: University of Guelph, 2011 Professor Martha Nandorfy This thesis is an investigation of representations of Mexico in twentieth century American and British literature. Drawing on various conceptions of biopolitics and biopower (from Foucault, Agamben and other theorists), I argue that the development of American pleasure tourism post-World War II has definitively transformed the biopolitical climate of Mexico for hosts and guests. Exploring the consolidation in Mexico of various forms of American pleasure tourism (my first chapter); cultures of vice and narco-tourism (my second chapter); and the erotic mixtures of sex and health that mark the beach resort (my third chapter), I posit an uncanny and perverse homology between the biopolitics of American tourists and Mexican labourers and qualify the neocolonial armature that links them together. Writers (from Jack Kerouac to Tennessee Williams) and intellectuals (from ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson to second-wave feminist Maryse Holder) have uniquely written contemporary “spaces of exception” in Mexico, have “founded” places where the normalizing discourses, performances of apparatuses of social control (in the U.S.) are made to have little consonance. I contrast the kinds of “lawlessness” and liminality white bodies at leisure and brown bodies at labour encounter and compel in their bare flesh, and investigate the various aesthetic discourses that underwrite the sovereignty and mobility of these bodies in late capitalism. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation could not have been completed without the support of the School of English and Theatre Studies’s vibrant intellectual community at the University of Guelph. I wish to thank my committee: Karen Racine, Christine Bold, and especially William Nericcio, Pablo Ramirez and Martha Nandorfy, for their valuable insights and continuous support throughout all stages of this project. Thanks as well to my loving family for all of their support: Joanne Gagnon, Michael Rashotte, Matthew Rashotte, Victoria Beltrano and Ayumi Shimizu. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements . .i Introduction: The Other Side of Paradise . 1 Biopolitics Across Abyssal Lines . .13 The Infernal Paradise . 33 Chapter Organization . 43 Chapter One: Mexico, Between Wilderness and Paradise . 49 Placing Agency in the Cultural Landscapes of La Mordida . 53 Americanized Mexico . .56 State of Exception and the Machinery of La Mordida . .62 Agency Outside of La Mordida . 77 The Society of Control and its Discontents: "On the Road to Utopia" . 80 Scenographic Otherness and the Technology of the Gaze . .96 “All Mexico Was One Vast Bohemian Camp”. .104 Reintegration . .110 Chapter Two: Mexican Drug Tourism and Global Narcontology . 114 The Enormous Vogue For All Things Illegal: Vice Tourism and the Borderlands . .122 “Trafficking with the Spirit World”: Tripping Psychedelic Mexico . .136 Unbordering Bodies and The Psychedelics of Race . .163 Chapter Three: Sex, Health and The Beach Resort: Transcultural Desire and Prophylaxis . 184 Segregating Saturnalia: Spring Break in the Resort . .186 Sexuality and Well-Being in Western Literature’s Mexico . .195 (A)septic Aesthetics in the “Nameless Country”: Tennessee Williams and the Resort . .197 Modern Bodies, Anxious Geographies and Tourist Desire . .199 Peripheral Sexualities and Eroticized Bare Life . .205 Cross-Border Contamination . .209 Latitudinal Feminisms and “Disposable Chavos:” The Letters of Maryse Holder . .218 Female Sex Tourism in Literature . 221 Feminist Agency and Primitive Masculinities . 225 Feminist Agency and Repressed Mexicanas . .231 From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Sacer . .235 Transcultural Healing Beyond the Resort . 249 Conclusion: Thinking Biopolitics in a Global Borderlands . 252 Works Cited . .262 ii Introduction: The Other Side of Paradise Alone, unemployed and disillusioned by love, academia and the great war, overwhelmed by his own role as a burgeoning artist in the wake of the jazz age, Amory Blaine contemplates his place in the world over the course of a long, dark night of the soul, trespassing in the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club (260). He meditates on the nature of originality, his own genius and vanity. He questions his intellectual heroes, dismissing or dismantling them along with the doctrinaires, messiahs of all guises and former lovers that have nurtured or admonished his “romantic egotism” and shaped, each in their own way, the dimensions of this existential crisis. He feels himself caught in that great labyrinth that few seek out and that becomes for him the emblem of modern(ist) progress itself; “He was where Goethe was when he began ‘Faust;’ he was where Conrad was when he wrote ‘Almayer’s Folly’” (264-65). And though Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise will soon conclude with Amory’s affirmation of self-gnosis (in the novel’s final line, he declares “I know myself … but that is all”), he falters for a moment, tempted to abandon the journey altogether: Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil— not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine- lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God 1 (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself and rather addicted to Oriental scents)—delivered from success and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all, only to the artificial lake of death. There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas—all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and poppies. (262) In many ways, Amory’s digressive desire to abandon rather than fully adopt the responsibilities he is forming for himself, intermingling with transgressive desires for simplicity, exotic indulgence, the wish to live with slackened ethics and even to make degeneracy an ambition, are symptomatic of more potent collective fantasies that have frequently informed twentieth century discursive constructions of Mexico in European and North American cultural production. Amory’s Mexico is not strictly timeless, but it is certainly out of sync with the accelerating momentum of modernity as he encounters it in early 1920s New York City. He explains on behalf of a generation of young, upwardly mobile, half-disillusioned, half-idealistic white men to a successful businessman of the old guard: “Modern life … changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we’re dawdling along. My idea is that 2 we’ve got to move much faster” (272). Yet, his Mexico remains outside this incipient globalization—it is not only seemingly pre-industrial, but the language of his digressive paragraphs clocks Mexico at another speed: the pace of the guitar strumming “an age-old dirge of Castile,” the languid stasis of the harem where a God “rather addicted to Oriental scents” remains “slack” and the sky’s palette is limited to “the colors of lips and poppies” as the opium-infused European fantasies of the Orient manifest themselves south of the U.S. border, but temporally worlds apart (262). And the vague “racial questions” that somehow characterize modern urban (which might be to say here New York City exclusively or uniquely) life do not seem to apply in Amory’s Mexico, where his ethnicity and class automatically secure his superiority and an entitlement to lavish hospitality. Indeed, Amory’s Mexico in many ways resonates much more with post-war pleasure tourism than the cultural explorations undertaken by his contemporaries (who I will discuss in a moment). The devil who tempts him to abandon self-knowledge seems placated by this “exotic Mexican [God]”1 (an interesting qualification from the scion of a Catholic family) who, loose in his judgments, absolves Amory from moral dilemmas—he could be “delivered from right and wrong”—and from the pressures he feels as an artist struggling with tradition and self-definition and the threats of failure—“delivered from success and hope and poverty” (262). Thus, beyond the obvious romantic and exotic stereotypes, perhaps heightened just beyond the peripheries of satire, we find a striking moral laxity endemic to Mexican society. The landscape itself is conducive to laziness (and antithetical to modernity) and therefore threatens to clot his creative ambitions; “[sinking] 1On a superficial level, the anxious fusion of good and evil in Mexico anticipates Lowry’s famous “infernal paradise” trope, first articulated in a letter

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